Scene: In Baffin’s Sea. Shipwrecked mariners afloat on an iceberg, which rises and falls on the smooth-rolling waves.
Morning broke grey and hazily; the wind, as if it had done its worst and spent its fury, went down, but the sea still ran very high, dashing in cold spray over the bergs on which the shipwrecked mariners were huddled together for warmth, and leaving a thick coating of ice on top of the sail that covered them.
Captain Blunt had gone on board one berg with half the crew, about ten all told, and Leonard, with Douglas, on board the other, along with the remainder, the two friends determining to be together to the bitter end, if indeed the end were to come.
The sea itself went down at last, as far as broken water was concerned; only a big round heaving swell continued, on which the icebergs rose and fell with a strange kind of motion that made all on board them drowsy.
When Leonard looked about him in the morning sunlight never a sign could be seen of the other berg. Nor all that day was it seen or on any other. It was gone. Other icebergs there were in dozens, but none with men on them.
Leonard heaved a sigh, and wished that he only had the wings of one of those happy sea-birds, that went wheeling and screaming round in the air, sometimes coming nearer and nearer, tack and half-tack, so close, out of mere curiosity, that they could have been knocked down with a boat-hook. All that day and all the next and next the berg floated silently on,—
“As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.”
Almost every day strange, wondering creatures came up out of the water to gaze at them. The tusked walrus, the gazelle-eyed seal—yes, even the narwhal must have spied them, and felt curiosity, for he shifted his course, and ploughed down towards the berg to have a look; then, as if satisfied that his mind could not fathom so great a mystery, went on his silent, solitary way once more.
Happily for the poor sailors, they had provisions. Had the ship gone down at once when struck, as vessels do sometimes go, they would now have been in a pitiful plight indeed.
But the cold was intense. There was no keeping it out by day hardly; only by constant exercise, which, thanks to the magnitude of the iceberg, they were able to maintain.